My friend Kristan asked for the link to the Personal Diversity Indicator test that I mentioned in this post.
Equilibria provides a quick way to find your results.
If you're interested in reading about all 12 e-Color descriptors (including the ones that I need to work most at working with, Reds), you can find that information here.
PS- Oh, and if you feel so inclined, I would love to hear about your results in the comments or via email.
The snow drifts low
and yet neglects to cover me, and I
dance just ahead to keep my heart in sight.
How like a queen, to seek with jealous eye
the face that flees you, hidden city, white
swan. There's no art to free me, blinded so.
- excerpted from A City Winter, by Frank O'Hara
Today, I confessed my fear of being in a city that snows. At the same time, my confession is of awe and anticipation.
and yet neglects to cover me, and I
dance just ahead to keep my heart in sight.
How like a queen, to seek with jealous eye
the face that flees you, hidden city, white
swan. There's no art to free me, blinded so.
- excerpted from A City Winter, by Frank O'Hara
Today, I confessed my fear of being in a city that snows. At the same time, my confession is of awe and anticipation.
When music is far enough away
the eyelid does not often move
and objects are still as lavender
without breath or distant rejoinder.
The cloud is then so subtly dragged
away by the silver flying machine
that the thought of it alone echoes
unbelievably; the sound of the motor falls
like a coin toward the ocean's floor
and the eye does not flicker
as it does when in the loud sun a coin
rises and nicks the near air. Now,
slowly, the heart breathes to music
while the coins lie in wet yellow sand.
the eyelid does not often move
and objects are still as lavender
without breath or distant rejoinder.
The cloud is then so subtly dragged
away by the silver flying machine
that the thought of it alone echoes
unbelievably; the sound of the motor falls
like a coin toward the ocean's floor
and the eye does not flicker
as it does when in the loud sun a coin
rises and nicks the near air. Now,
slowly, the heart breathes to music
while the coins lie in wet yellow sand.
- Frank O'Hara, "A Quiet Poem"
they call it lazy summer, but mine has been anything but.
The alternatives of summer do not remove
us from this place. The fainting into skies
from a diving board, the express train to
Detroit's damp bars, the excess of affection
on the couch near an open window or a Bauhaus
fire escape, the lazy regions of stars, all
are strangers. Like Mayakovsky read on steps
of cool marble, or Yeats danced in a theatre
of polite music. The classroon day of dozing
and grammar, the partial eclipse of the head
in the row in front of the head of poplars,
sweet Syrinx! last out the summer in a stay
of iron.
- excerpted from Frank O'Hara's Ann Arbor Variations. of interest in me because the city is becoming of increasing interest to me in so many ways.
The alternatives of summer do not remove
us from this place. The fainting into skies
from a diving board, the express train to
Detroit's damp bars, the excess of affection
on the couch near an open window or a Bauhaus
fire escape, the lazy regions of stars, all
are strangers. Like Mayakovsky read on steps
of cool marble, or Yeats danced in a theatre
of polite music. The classroon day of dozing
and grammar, the partial eclipse of the head
in the row in front of the head of poplars,
sweet Syrinx! last out the summer in a stay
of iron.
- excerpted from Frank O'Hara's Ann Arbor Variations. of interest in me because the city is becoming of increasing interest to me in so many ways.
Monday, July 30, 2012
fascinating.
for work, I took a "Personality Diversity Indicator" test.
Below are my results.
I am creative and in some cases, musically oriented. I am adept at starting and sustaining harmonious relationships. I am tolerant, understanding, supportive and a natural listener. I love life and I love people.
I have an inherent desire to help people and I have to be aware that this in-built need could get me hurt or even killed. I find it virtually impossible to stop myself from jumping in to help someone else.
My tendencies include:
With tasks: Because I am so people-oriented, my improvement opportunities are mostly associated with tasks. I especially need to work to strengthen my problem-solving and decision-making skills. These skills can help me deal better with complex and unwieldy tasks.
With people: I need to monitor the balance between pleasing myself and pleasing others. I tend to expend so much energy on others that I sometimes neglect my own needs.
for work, I took a "Personality Diversity Indicator" test.
Below are my results.
Yellow/Blue - The Relating Socialiser
I am a person who enjoys and thrives on having people around me. My focus, though, will be on the others, not me. I have a naturally warm disposition and people are generally comfortable opening up to me. I have a natural desire to help others, even doing volunteer work for organizations that allow me to aid others. I love parties.I am creative and in some cases, musically oriented. I am adept at starting and sustaining harmonious relationships. I am tolerant, understanding, supportive and a natural listener. I love life and I love people.
I have an inherent desire to help people and I have to be aware that this in-built need could get me hurt or even killed. I find it virtually impossible to stop myself from jumping in to help someone else.
My tendencies include:
- I project a warm and caring attitude and prefer the same from others
- I enjoy displays of affection and approval
- I dislike aggression and conflict
- I get turned off by complexity and confusion
- I have a tendency to be more expressive or emotional under pressure
- I am a challenge for RED / GREENS - GREEN / REDS, as my focus is generally on people, not tasks and objectives
With tasks: Because I am so people-oriented, my improvement opportunities are mostly associated with tasks. I especially need to work to strengthen my problem-solving and decision-making skills. These skills can help me deal better with complex and unwieldy tasks.
With people: I need to monitor the balance between pleasing myself and pleasing others. I tend to expend so much energy on others that I sometimes neglect my own needs.
- I need to be more fast-paced when dealing with REDS, especially when there are time pressure deadlines
- I should start to think about what personally satisfies me, independent of the pleasure I get from helping other
Friday, July 27, 2012
The following was written by Kaminsky.
"You can't buy me," she wrote in 1932, "That is the whole point. You can buy me only in essence (i.e. my essence). To buy is to buy oneself off. You can't buy yourself off from me. You can buy me only with the whole sky in yourself. A whole sky in which, perhaps, there is no place for me." And, in the earlier poem, she wrote:
To kiss a forehead is to erase worry.
I kiss your forehead.
To kiss the eyes is to lift sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.
To kiss the lips is to drink water.
I kiss your lips.
To kiss a forehead is to erase memory.
I kiss your forehead.
That sort of difficulty. As she confronted herself in her diary (upon return to Russia after almost twenty years of exile), "my difficulty (in writing poems—and perhaps other people's difficulty in understanding them) is in the impossibility of my goal, for example, of using words to express a moan: ah—ah—ah. To express a sound using words, using meanings. So that the only thing left in the ears would be ah—ah—ah. Why such goals?"
During the first year of my deafness, I saw her with a man. She wore a purple scarf knotted around her head. Half-dancing, he placed his head on her breast. And she began to sing. I observed her with devouring attention. I imagined her voice to smell of oranges; I fell in love with her voice. She was a woman who lived like a conspirator sending contradictory signals. "Do not eat the apple seeds," she threatened me, "Not the apple seeds. The branches will grow from your belly!" She touched my ear, fingering it.
I know nothing of her husband except for his fatal heart attack in a moving bus. There was no strain on her face, but looking at her, I understood the dignity of grief. Returning from his funeral, she took off her shoes and walked barefoot in the snow. * * *
MARINA TSVETAEVA
by Ilya Kaminsky
In each line's strange syllable: she awakes
as a gull, torn
between heaven and earth.
I accept her, stand with her face to face.
-- in this dream: she wears her dress
like a sail, runs behind me, stopping
when I stop. She laughs
as a child speaking to herself:
"soul = pain + everything else."
I bend clumsily at the knees
and I quarrel no more,
all I want is a human window
in a house whose roof is my life.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Ilya Kaminsky coaxes me to sleep with his compelling words that i reach for
---
in which we move. For whatever I say is a kind of petition and the darkest
days must I praise.
--
Let us wash our faces in the wind and forget the strict shapes of affection.
Let the pregnant woman hold something of clay in her hand.
For the secret of patience is his wife’s patience
Let her man kneel on the roof, clearing his throat,
he who loved roofs, tonight and tonight, making love to her and her forgetting,
a man with a fast heartbeat, a woman dancing with a broom, uneven breath.
Let them borrow the light from the blind.
Let them kiss your forehead, approached from every angle.
What is silence? Something of the sky in us.
There will be evidence, there will be evidence.
Let them speak of air and its necessities. Whatever they will open, will open.
freezing my thighs off in my hotel room, reading poetry and interviews after a night of karaoke with strangers whom i now call friends, maybe even more. now that is what i called living life.
An interview with Ilya Kaminsky by SJ Fowler.
Simply one of the few boundless poets on the world scene, and already a centrifugal presence within American poetry, Ilya Kaminsky carries with him the power of the great Russian tradition and the obvious potential to be recognised, in an age where poetry is a reticent presence in the public’s eye, as one of the finest writers of the oncoming century. An activist as well as a poet, his remarkable energy and intellect permeate his earnest, fulsome poetry and his unforgettable, idiosyncratic readings. In an interview which seems typically representative of his generous spirit, Ilya has offered one of the most ebullient accounts featured in the Maintenant series, and we are especially excited to have him read at the next Maintenant event in London, this coming october. To mark our 70th edition, Ilya Kaminsky
with thanks to Nikola Madzirov за многу нешта
3:AM: You arrived in America at only 16 years of age, really you have spent more of your life in the US. Is this duality of nationality fundamental to elements of your work?
IK: A poet isn’t born into a country. A poet is born into childhood. And, those who are lucky, stay in that domain. (Akhmatova on Pasternak: “he was granted a gift of eternal childhood).
What that state of being has to do with geography is an open question. In my own life, the fall of the USSR, and the brief war in the neighboring Moldova was probably a great deal more fundamental in affecting my being a writer than a mere fact of a move to another country.
I was sixteen, yes—but sixteen years of age for a Soviet kid is pretty much an adulthood, and I was hardly an exception. When you think that Lermontov was already dead by something like 27, you get the idea.
But, then, there is the question of English. I did not know the language at all when I came here, so learning the new names for every single object around me, and them pushing those objects into motion with Anglo-Saxon verbs of music that are quite different from Slavic one – pushing them through sentences whose structure was a great deal more architecturally direct than one I was born into, was of course, quite a change. Russian words are for the most part much longer than English, and the Russian alphabet has 33 letters against the 26 in English. The grammar structure is a great deal more organized (they are still engaged in the reform of language in Russia as we speak; and the Russian equivalent of the King James Bible was only published this year). It was like moving from the wild bazaar into an opera house.
It is not to say that one is better than the other. Far from it. Some poets (most poets, actually) prefer wild bazaars to opera houses!
The question of language, especially as it relates to the lyric poet is something we can talk about for a while. You see, I believe that no great lyric poet ever speaks in the so-called “proper” language of his or her time. Emily Dickinson didn’t write in “proper” English grammar but in a slanted music of fragmentary perception. Half a world and half a century away, Cesar Vallejo placed three dots in the middle of the line, as if language itself were not enough, as if the poet’s voice needed to leap from one image to another, to make—to use Eliot’s phrase—a raid on the inarticulate. Paul Celan wrote to his wife from Germany, where he briefly visited from his voluntary exile in France: “The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.”
As for duality – I don’t think there exists a poet on this planet without a duality. Duality is a mother of metaphors. And, if coming into a different reality by stepping on a different shore, propels a poet into more duality, a poet should only be grateful.
3:AM: Your work is marked by it’s energy, it’s pace of imagery and it’s weight, in my opinion, do you write within certain mental constructs, and develop your poetry slowly, or does it come in rushes?
IK: Thank you for your kind words.
Images do take an important role. Image, for me, is an international language. An image from Horace of a young boy playing on a flute to cows can be translated into any language. Whether you are in France or in Ukraine, or in China, you “get” it. It is a photograph made of words. So, image is a basic muscle of the poem, one could say. But I don’t think one can ride very far on just the images alone. There got to be some thinking/emotion and, of course, music. Music in the lyric takes different forms in different cultures, but it is always there. Even the absence of it is musical, which is to say we organize silences in our poems for specific reasons, and rhythms.
As to writing slowly or in rushes—I write very slowly; good old Horace’s advice to take 10 years per book is a sign on my doorstep. Or, to play with that old cliché that “poems aren’t finished, they are abandoned”: my next book is finished but not abandoned. I honestly believe that there is no better editor for the poet than time itself.
Your mention of “mental constructs” made me smile. Why? Well, you see Russian language is still quite a mystical, Borgesian, Kafkaesque creature. For example, until the early 20th century, the mnemonic names inherited from Church Slavonic were used for the letters. Which drove Pushkin mad, by the way, he wrote: “The letters constituting the Slavonic alphabet do not produce any sense.” Pushkin’s remark shouldn’t be our problem. But there is more to it: according to some scholars the names of the first several letters of the Slavonic alphabet:
“Aз буки веди глаголь добро есть живете зело, земля, и иже и како люди мыслете наш он покой….”
seem to form a text:
“I know letters” “To speak is a beneficence” “Live, while working heartily, people of the Earth, in the manner people should obey” “try to understand the Universe”
Imagine that! Imagine, that mirroring the above, every letter of English alphabet should have a name and together they all form a text. How about that. Where is Borges when we need him?
3:AM: At times the reflectiveness that appears in your work is driven away from being at all nostalgic by it’s reverberation of image, by the sheer force of it’s motion when considered on the page. Do you concern yourself with being too reflective or temporally sensitive in your work?
IK: I don’t think it is a good idea for a poet to turn into a philosopher. I like philosophers like I like my uncles. I will let them buy me lunch. But that is about it.
3:AM: What are your thoughts on contemporary Russian poetry? Are there noticeable trends in what is being read by Russians, are they reading poetry as they once did, in your view?
IK: The Russian literary tradition is one of the youngest in the world. Pushkin, the Russian Shakespeare, was writing in 1824. What the hell is 1824 for English poetry? Byron was already dead by 1824. And, who the hell is Byron? Think of Shakespeare, Milton, Donne and Co. - those that Russian poetry simply did not have. It is astounding.
But it is also a great gift and great luck for a literary tradition. That is why, I would argue, Russians were able to have the great epic novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the late 19th century. That is why Pushkin was able to do something with a novel-in-verse that no one else was able to even approach on the same level. That is also why the Silver age and years of Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Zabolotsky, Kharms, Khlebnikhov, and others came out of nowhere and no other European tradition of that time can rival it.
Although Whitman told us that great poetry demands great audiences, I am quite unsure it is so. Yes, they had audiences of thousands for the poetry readings at stadiums in Russia in 1960s. But so what? The sort of a thing those audiences got to hear was very mediocre. Quite on the opposite side, Kharms died of hunger without much of an audience. And he did something Beckett dreamed of, long before Beckett began to dream about it.
And, that is just one example. A poet is a private person. A great poet writes work that is gorgeous enough, powerful enough to speak privately with many people at the same time.
Think: Dickinson. Think: Celan. Or, think: Mandelstam.
That is all I am interested in saying about audience.
3:AM: Do the movements of poetry within Russia take heed of work outside Russia, to your knowledge? For example, have trends in 20th century American poetry impacted the style and nature of contemporary poetry?
IK: Yes, by all means. Russia is one big house of influences. And anyone who tells you otherwise and who speaks of the “holy mother Russia” and its special unique place on Earth is most likely an ignorant nationalist who offers his loud opinions without reading his own native literature.
Zhukovsky, an early Russian classic and founder of the Arzamas literary society, who among other things was Pushkin’s teacher, was completely influenced by European Romantics. His poems, memorized by and heard by many Russians are actually translations. Many of Pushkin’s own lyrics, also memorized by thousands of readers as Russian classics are translations as well. Lermontov’s most famous lyric is in fact a translation of Goethe.
When Akhmatova was writing Requiem she was translating Macbeth. Pasternak translated many of Shakespeare’s plays and all of Faust. Mandelshtam wrote what is probably the most interesting essay/study on Dante that we have in the Western tradition. Tsvetaeva translated Lorca. Brodsky without John Donne would never be the Brodsky we know about. And so on.
A literary tradition is first of all a conversation - with the self, with the world, with other traditions. Without such conversation no literary tradition survives for a long time. There is always the wild need for fresh blood.
As far as 20th Century American poetry: one can certainly see the influence of Auden and Eliot, and to a much, much lesser degree Stevens and the language poets.
Russians, traditionally, have been influenced by the French and the Germans in their literary matters. Of course, Byron was a huge presence in the 19th century and certain English classics in the 20th (again, think of that marriage between Donne and Brodsky that produced many bastard children). An American influence is relatively new.
But then, of course, the question of influences isn’t new in any tradition. Where would we in English be without Italians and their sonnets that we so appropriately borrowed? Or, even before Renaissance, where would we be in regard to influences when we speak about Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde? And where would we be with Marlowe’s Ovid or Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat? One tends to think of Herrick as the most English of all English lyric poets, but where would he be without the Latin tradition of someone like Catullus? And, as for our contemporaries, what would Anne Carson do without Euripides and Sappho and Christopher Logue without Homer?
Regardless of what literature one considers, a conversation with another tradition is what makes it breathe.
3:AM: Could you tell us about the Ecco anthology of international poetry? It seems an immense undertaking.
IK: Yes, it was a lot of work. I am grateful to have had the chance to do it, as it gave me an excuse to close the door and read deeply for several years.
The book does not pretend to give a full picture. Far from it. But it does attempt to bring together most of the more or less important names from 20th century poetry in translation under the same cover. Strangely enough, there aren’t many books on the market that try to do it. Which is too bad. We need a great deal more conversation about other traditions in the English language. Other western languages seem to be a great deal ahead of us in this matter.
3:AM: You are prominent as an academic and as a teacher in the US, and seem to display an immense energy for teaching. How much does your work with students effect your own work or your own understanding of contemporary poetry?
IK: I am lucky to have good students. They are wonderfully dedicated, hardworking, gifted. Truly. They are hardly what you would call “pupils”. I see them as colleagues who teach me more than I teach them. My plan in this regard is very simple: before they raise their hands with “yes, but”—as students tend to, in this day and age—I put in their pockets a list of 30-60 books to read & discuss with me one-on-one. And, when they come back to my office, they are different people! Then, the real fun begins! And, I learn a great deal.
I don’t believe what they call a traditional workshop. I believe in conversation about literature, and conversation about language, about verbs, nouns, about images, rhymes, line-breaks, rhythms, tones, etc.
So in any given class of 3 hours we spend the first hour talking about other people’s books. The sort of books of poems that change our lives. Only after that do we talk about our own writing. And, even with this in mind: the idea of a workshop has begun to remind one of a business school classroom in this country. It does not have to be that way. The great classical poets such as Issa and Basho had workshops and led workshops for decades. Akhmatova, Gumiliov, Mandelstam and other Russians also had their famous workshop, the Poet’s Guild. I don’t need to tell you about Wordsworth and Coleridge. It is natural for poets to have an in-depth conversation about their work. If one sees it that way, one learns a great deal.
3:AM: Could you outline your work at National Immigration Law Centre and with legal aid organisations?
IK: I think I was lucky enough to study public interest law in one of the more liberal law schools in US, and at the time when things in CA public interest-law matters were somewhat easier—that is pre-Governator days. The National Emigration Law Center is a place where much of the immigration law advocacy research goes on in US. It is a small office with a few workers—all of them women quite passionate about what they do, and they produce a wealth of information. And, they are also very creative. In fact, my boss there at that time is now a published fiction writer. She was one of the kindest people I met. At Bay Area Legal Aid, things were quite busy—but happily busy—the lawyers there are hardly what the public image of lawyers in the US represents: they work 80 hours a week for minimum wage and they bring coffee to each other and their clients. The clients are those who can’t pay for the services, and there are lines and lines of them. I worked for the “benefits” department, with a great attorney, a very quiet and precise man who taught me a lot. Basically: you lose your minimum wage job and along with it your employer takes away the health-insurance which they are supposed to give you for X number of months. What do you do? You go to Legal Aid.
As for me, I started looking for another job after a certain body-builder became our State’s governor and many things changed at those public-interest organizations.
3:AM: How much is your reception often coloured by your origins as a Russian and some legacy of overt respect for European poets from Russia and Eastern Europe during the Soviet era? I notice often in positive criticisms of your work, names like Brodsky and Milosz seem synonymous with your identity as a poet, & is your deafness a profound element of your own understanding of poetry, or does it have no affect whatsoever?
IK: I will try to be brief: I did write in Russian to begin with. And I read in Russian a great deal. But do I consider myself I an American poet? Yes, I do. But, then: what does it mean to be an American poet? What is my American experience? Kissing my wife is my American experience. Taking walks. Eating out. Playing with my cats. Talking to my friends. Getting into bar-fights. Making love to this very language. And, yes, I can hardly hear it. So what? Aren’t these the things we all do? Yes. Therefore, although one is grateful to be mentioned in the same sentence with the likes of Milosz and Brodsky (whether one deserves such a mention is another question), I resist being pigeonholed as a “Eastern European poet” or “deaf poet” or even “American poet” for that matter. I am a human being. I like that tradition.
3:AM: Writing in a second language always produces a unique result, and you did publish work in Russian. Why do you write solely in English?
IK: Well, I think the answer to this question is fairly simple: I fell in love.
First, though, there was death. My father died in 1994, less than a year after we arrived to the US. I understood right away that it would be impossible for me to write about his death in the Russian language, as one author says of his deceased father somewhere, “Ah, don’t become mere lines of beautiful poetry!” I choose English because no one in my family or friends knew it — no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom. It still is.
So, yes, you could say: I fell in love.
An interview with Ilya Kaminsky by SJ Fowler.
Simply one of the few boundless poets on the world scene, and already a centrifugal presence within American poetry, Ilya Kaminsky carries with him the power of the great Russian tradition and the obvious potential to be recognised, in an age where poetry is a reticent presence in the public’s eye, as one of the finest writers of the oncoming century. An activist as well as a poet, his remarkable energy and intellect permeate his earnest, fulsome poetry and his unforgettable, idiosyncratic readings. In an interview which seems typically representative of his generous spirit, Ilya has offered one of the most ebullient accounts featured in the Maintenant series, and we are especially excited to have him read at the next Maintenant event in London, this coming october. To mark our 70th edition, Ilya Kaminsky
with thanks to Nikola Madzirov за многу нешта
3:AM: You arrived in America at only 16 years of age, really you have spent more of your life in the US. Is this duality of nationality fundamental to elements of your work?
IK: A poet isn’t born into a country. A poet is born into childhood. And, those who are lucky, stay in that domain. (Akhmatova on Pasternak: “he was granted a gift of eternal childhood).
What that state of being has to do with geography is an open question. In my own life, the fall of the USSR, and the brief war in the neighboring Moldova was probably a great deal more fundamental in affecting my being a writer than a mere fact of a move to another country.
I was sixteen, yes—but sixteen years of age for a Soviet kid is pretty much an adulthood, and I was hardly an exception. When you think that Lermontov was already dead by something like 27, you get the idea.
But, then, there is the question of English. I did not know the language at all when I came here, so learning the new names for every single object around me, and them pushing those objects into motion with Anglo-Saxon verbs of music that are quite different from Slavic one – pushing them through sentences whose structure was a great deal more architecturally direct than one I was born into, was of course, quite a change. Russian words are for the most part much longer than English, and the Russian alphabet has 33 letters against the 26 in English. The grammar structure is a great deal more organized (they are still engaged in the reform of language in Russia as we speak; and the Russian equivalent of the King James Bible was only published this year). It was like moving from the wild bazaar into an opera house.
It is not to say that one is better than the other. Far from it. Some poets (most poets, actually) prefer wild bazaars to opera houses!
The question of language, especially as it relates to the lyric poet is something we can talk about for a while. You see, I believe that no great lyric poet ever speaks in the so-called “proper” language of his or her time. Emily Dickinson didn’t write in “proper” English grammar but in a slanted music of fragmentary perception. Half a world and half a century away, Cesar Vallejo placed three dots in the middle of the line, as if language itself were not enough, as if the poet’s voice needed to leap from one image to another, to make—to use Eliot’s phrase—a raid on the inarticulate. Paul Celan wrote to his wife from Germany, where he briefly visited from his voluntary exile in France: “The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.”
As for duality – I don’t think there exists a poet on this planet without a duality. Duality is a mother of metaphors. And, if coming into a different reality by stepping on a different shore, propels a poet into more duality, a poet should only be grateful.
3:AM: Your work is marked by it’s energy, it’s pace of imagery and it’s weight, in my opinion, do you write within certain mental constructs, and develop your poetry slowly, or does it come in rushes?
IK: Thank you for your kind words.
Images do take an important role. Image, for me, is an international language. An image from Horace of a young boy playing on a flute to cows can be translated into any language. Whether you are in France or in Ukraine, or in China, you “get” it. It is a photograph made of words. So, image is a basic muscle of the poem, one could say. But I don’t think one can ride very far on just the images alone. There got to be some thinking/emotion and, of course, music. Music in the lyric takes different forms in different cultures, but it is always there. Even the absence of it is musical, which is to say we organize silences in our poems for specific reasons, and rhythms.
As to writing slowly or in rushes—I write very slowly; good old Horace’s advice to take 10 years per book is a sign on my doorstep. Or, to play with that old cliché that “poems aren’t finished, they are abandoned”: my next book is finished but not abandoned. I honestly believe that there is no better editor for the poet than time itself.
Your mention of “mental constructs” made me smile. Why? Well, you see Russian language is still quite a mystical, Borgesian, Kafkaesque creature. For example, until the early 20th century, the mnemonic names inherited from Church Slavonic were used for the letters. Which drove Pushkin mad, by the way, he wrote: “The letters constituting the Slavonic alphabet do not produce any sense.” Pushkin’s remark shouldn’t be our problem. But there is more to it: according to some scholars the names of the first several letters of the Slavonic alphabet:
“Aз буки веди глаголь добро есть живете зело, земля, и иже и како люди мыслете наш он покой….”
seem to form a text:
“I know letters” “To speak is a beneficence” “Live, while working heartily, people of the Earth, in the manner people should obey” “try to understand the Universe”
Imagine that! Imagine, that mirroring the above, every letter of English alphabet should have a name and together they all form a text. How about that. Where is Borges when we need him?
3:AM: At times the reflectiveness that appears in your work is driven away from being at all nostalgic by it’s reverberation of image, by the sheer force of it’s motion when considered on the page. Do you concern yourself with being too reflective or temporally sensitive in your work?
IK: I don’t think it is a good idea for a poet to turn into a philosopher. I like philosophers like I like my uncles. I will let them buy me lunch. But that is about it.
3:AM: What are your thoughts on contemporary Russian poetry? Are there noticeable trends in what is being read by Russians, are they reading poetry as they once did, in your view?
IK: The Russian literary tradition is one of the youngest in the world. Pushkin, the Russian Shakespeare, was writing in 1824. What the hell is 1824 for English poetry? Byron was already dead by 1824. And, who the hell is Byron? Think of Shakespeare, Milton, Donne and Co. - those that Russian poetry simply did not have. It is astounding.
But it is also a great gift and great luck for a literary tradition. That is why, I would argue, Russians were able to have the great epic novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the late 19th century. That is why Pushkin was able to do something with a novel-in-verse that no one else was able to even approach on the same level. That is also why the Silver age and years of Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Zabolotsky, Kharms, Khlebnikhov, and others came out of nowhere and no other European tradition of that time can rival it.
Although Whitman told us that great poetry demands great audiences, I am quite unsure it is so. Yes, they had audiences of thousands for the poetry readings at stadiums in Russia in 1960s. But so what? The sort of a thing those audiences got to hear was very mediocre. Quite on the opposite side, Kharms died of hunger without much of an audience. And he did something Beckett dreamed of, long before Beckett began to dream about it.
And, that is just one example. A poet is a private person. A great poet writes work that is gorgeous enough, powerful enough to speak privately with many people at the same time.
Think: Dickinson. Think: Celan. Or, think: Mandelstam.
That is all I am interested in saying about audience.
3:AM: Do the movements of poetry within Russia take heed of work outside Russia, to your knowledge? For example, have trends in 20th century American poetry impacted the style and nature of contemporary poetry?
IK: Yes, by all means. Russia is one big house of influences. And anyone who tells you otherwise and who speaks of the “holy mother Russia” and its special unique place on Earth is most likely an ignorant nationalist who offers his loud opinions without reading his own native literature.
Zhukovsky, an early Russian classic and founder of the Arzamas literary society, who among other things was Pushkin’s teacher, was completely influenced by European Romantics. His poems, memorized by and heard by many Russians are actually translations. Many of Pushkin’s own lyrics, also memorized by thousands of readers as Russian classics are translations as well. Lermontov’s most famous lyric is in fact a translation of Goethe.
When Akhmatova was writing Requiem she was translating Macbeth. Pasternak translated many of Shakespeare’s plays and all of Faust. Mandelshtam wrote what is probably the most interesting essay/study on Dante that we have in the Western tradition. Tsvetaeva translated Lorca. Brodsky without John Donne would never be the Brodsky we know about. And so on.
A literary tradition is first of all a conversation - with the self, with the world, with other traditions. Without such conversation no literary tradition survives for a long time. There is always the wild need for fresh blood.
As far as 20th Century American poetry: one can certainly see the influence of Auden and Eliot, and to a much, much lesser degree Stevens and the language poets.
Russians, traditionally, have been influenced by the French and the Germans in their literary matters. Of course, Byron was a huge presence in the 19th century and certain English classics in the 20th (again, think of that marriage between Donne and Brodsky that produced many bastard children). An American influence is relatively new.
But then, of course, the question of influences isn’t new in any tradition. Where would we in English be without Italians and their sonnets that we so appropriately borrowed? Or, even before Renaissance, where would we be in regard to influences when we speak about Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde? And where would we be with Marlowe’s Ovid or Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat? One tends to think of Herrick as the most English of all English lyric poets, but where would he be without the Latin tradition of someone like Catullus? And, as for our contemporaries, what would Anne Carson do without Euripides and Sappho and Christopher Logue without Homer?
Regardless of what literature one considers, a conversation with another tradition is what makes it breathe.
3:AM: Could you tell us about the Ecco anthology of international poetry? It seems an immense undertaking.
IK: Yes, it was a lot of work. I am grateful to have had the chance to do it, as it gave me an excuse to close the door and read deeply for several years.
The book does not pretend to give a full picture. Far from it. But it does attempt to bring together most of the more or less important names from 20th century poetry in translation under the same cover. Strangely enough, there aren’t many books on the market that try to do it. Which is too bad. We need a great deal more conversation about other traditions in the English language. Other western languages seem to be a great deal ahead of us in this matter.
3:AM: You are prominent as an academic and as a teacher in the US, and seem to display an immense energy for teaching. How much does your work with students effect your own work or your own understanding of contemporary poetry?
IK: I am lucky to have good students. They are wonderfully dedicated, hardworking, gifted. Truly. They are hardly what you would call “pupils”. I see them as colleagues who teach me more than I teach them. My plan in this regard is very simple: before they raise their hands with “yes, but”—as students tend to, in this day and age—I put in their pockets a list of 30-60 books to read & discuss with me one-on-one. And, when they come back to my office, they are different people! Then, the real fun begins! And, I learn a great deal.
I don’t believe what they call a traditional workshop. I believe in conversation about literature, and conversation about language, about verbs, nouns, about images, rhymes, line-breaks, rhythms, tones, etc.
So in any given class of 3 hours we spend the first hour talking about other people’s books. The sort of books of poems that change our lives. Only after that do we talk about our own writing. And, even with this in mind: the idea of a workshop has begun to remind one of a business school classroom in this country. It does not have to be that way. The great classical poets such as Issa and Basho had workshops and led workshops for decades. Akhmatova, Gumiliov, Mandelstam and other Russians also had their famous workshop, the Poet’s Guild. I don’t need to tell you about Wordsworth and Coleridge. It is natural for poets to have an in-depth conversation about their work. If one sees it that way, one learns a great deal.
3:AM: Could you outline your work at National Immigration Law Centre and with legal aid organisations?
IK: I think I was lucky enough to study public interest law in one of the more liberal law schools in US, and at the time when things in CA public interest-law matters were somewhat easier—that is pre-Governator days. The National Emigration Law Center is a place where much of the immigration law advocacy research goes on in US. It is a small office with a few workers—all of them women quite passionate about what they do, and they produce a wealth of information. And, they are also very creative. In fact, my boss there at that time is now a published fiction writer. She was one of the kindest people I met. At Bay Area Legal Aid, things were quite busy—but happily busy—the lawyers there are hardly what the public image of lawyers in the US represents: they work 80 hours a week for minimum wage and they bring coffee to each other and their clients. The clients are those who can’t pay for the services, and there are lines and lines of them. I worked for the “benefits” department, with a great attorney, a very quiet and precise man who taught me a lot. Basically: you lose your minimum wage job and along with it your employer takes away the health-insurance which they are supposed to give you for X number of months. What do you do? You go to Legal Aid.
As for me, I started looking for another job after a certain body-builder became our State’s governor and many things changed at those public-interest organizations.
3:AM: How much is your reception often coloured by your origins as a Russian and some legacy of overt respect for European poets from Russia and Eastern Europe during the Soviet era? I notice often in positive criticisms of your work, names like Brodsky and Milosz seem synonymous with your identity as a poet, & is your deafness a profound element of your own understanding of poetry, or does it have no affect whatsoever?
IK: I will try to be brief: I did write in Russian to begin with. And I read in Russian a great deal. But do I consider myself I an American poet? Yes, I do. But, then: what does it mean to be an American poet? What is my American experience? Kissing my wife is my American experience. Taking walks. Eating out. Playing with my cats. Talking to my friends. Getting into bar-fights. Making love to this very language. And, yes, I can hardly hear it. So what? Aren’t these the things we all do? Yes. Therefore, although one is grateful to be mentioned in the same sentence with the likes of Milosz and Brodsky (whether one deserves such a mention is another question), I resist being pigeonholed as a “Eastern European poet” or “deaf poet” or even “American poet” for that matter. I am a human being. I like that tradition.
3:AM: Writing in a second language always produces a unique result, and you did publish work in Russian. Why do you write solely in English?
IK: Well, I think the answer to this question is fairly simple: I fell in love.
First, though, there was death. My father died in 1994, less than a year after we arrived to the US. I understood right away that it would be impossible for me to write about his death in the Russian language, as one author says of his deceased father somewhere, “Ah, don’t become mere lines of beautiful poetry!” I choose English because no one in my family or friends knew it — no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom. It still is.
So, yes, you could say: I fell in love.
Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
"Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Thanks, Viju.
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Thanks, Viju.
posted at flickr/rosekuo
self,
in a bathroom in a house that's not mine, in a mirror that was not whole, with a camera that stopped working afterwards.
houston, tx.
.
in a bathroom in a house that's not mine, in a mirror that was not whole, with a camera that stopped working afterwards.
houston, tx.
.
i have not worked at taking a self portrait in the past four years.
since then, I've ignited, fought, and settled revolutions within my heart- won or lost I can't tell, but perhaps that was never the purpose.
-
i am reading a book about change. and the most ground-shaking point in the book is that many things can effect change, but the factor that creates permanent change is belief. Higher powers and a transformation of habit can help us change, but it is the capacity to BELIEVE that things will get better that makes ALL the difference.
Todd Heatherton said, "Change occurs among other people. It seems real when we can see it in other people's eyes."
i have friends and family who surround me, sentinels in the darkness of the past two years. They have guided me through the storms, and they have been my most powerful weapons in these revolutions of heart.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Definitely laughed at this. Some of it I don't practice, but man. Come on, roaring twenties, let me at it!
21 Ways You Should Take Advantage Of Your 20s
JUL. 5, 2012 By SARI MOON
1. Don’t feel the need to respond to every text message, phone call, and email the second it reaches you. Once upon a time, it took longer than a minute to reach someone. People used stamps and envelopes; they had answering machines they didn’t check for hours, sometimes days. No one will die if you don’t immediately respond to every message you receive.
2. Ask for what’s owed to you. Half the time, you’re not getting your needs met because you’re not making them known. Your employers, romantic interests, and friends are not going to read your mind and give you what you need unless you speak up.
3. Never turn down an open bar. Seek them out and make them a priority. Indulging in open bars when you’re older isn’t appropriate because a) people will think you have an alcohol problem and b) you’re supposed to have enough money to afford your own alcohol.
4. If you’re unhappy and someone offers you a way out, take it. You don’t owe your first job years of loyalty and your first-born; you don’t have to stay in your city just because you’re on a first-name basis with the bodega guy. Do what feels right; the initial fear will give way to excitement.
5. Enjoy all the sex marathons you’re having in your 20s, dudes. In your 30s, the time between erections is waaaay longer. Then, some 20-something babe is all, “Can you go again?” after five minutes and you’re all, “No I can’t ‘go again.’ I am still dealing with having just came. Jesus.” That’s not a concern when you’re in your 20s — don’t ever take it for granted.
6. Let your more successful friends pick up the check this time. Before you’re 30, it’s still okay to be work as a barista and not have your career path figured out. Save your cash and take up your lawyer-friend’s offer for dinner. Use the money you saved to buy more ramen.
7. Play a sport you played in elementary school. Kickball, dodgeball. There are leagues for these games now. Get on it.
8. Learn how to cook. Here’s an idea — instead of spending all your money on ridiculously marked-up restaurant food, save your money by buying non-processed WHOLE FOODS and LEARNING HOW TO MAKE A MEAL OF REAL FOOD. A meal of real food is not a box of Annie’s Organic Mac and Cheese — that’s PROCESSED FOOD. A meal is something like sauteed brussel sprouts with onions and pinto beans garnished with salt and pepper. You’ll thank yourself for learning how to cook when your metabolism catches up to you.
9. Keep making friends. Everyone complains that it’s hard to make friends after college, but we still manage to find new people to flirt with and date, right? It’s not that hard. You know yourself better than you ever have before, and your friends can finally reflect that. Don’t cling to old friends because it’s too frightening or ‘risky’ to make new ones.
10. Let your parents buy your plane ticket home. It can be trying to be stuck in a house with your family for a few days or a week, but vacations in your 20s can be hard to come by. Let them subsidize your trips home and do you as much as you can when you get there.
11. Stay up late. In your 20s, you’re all, “Let’s go to another bar!” “Who wants to eat at a diner?” “Have you guys seen the sun rise from the High Line?” “In this moment I swear we were infinite!” When you get older, this becomes, “What are you doing? Go home. Watch Parks and Rec and go to sleep. What is wrong with you, staying up all night? Who has time for that?” If you’re in your 20s, you do. You have all the time. Do it now and take advantage of how not tired you are. You think you’re crabby now when you stay up too late? You’ll never believe how terrible you feel when you do it in your 30s.
12. Savor those 20s hangovers. They are a gift from God so that you’ll always remember what your tolerance level is. Your hangover recovery time is like flippin’ Wolverine in your 20s. You wake up, feel like death, pull on some shades, gulp down coffee or maybe a bloody Mary and whine about your headache over brunch. Oh, boo hoo. When you’re older, every hangover is Apocalypse F-cking Now. You’re not making it to brunch. You’re not making it off your goddamn floor in a weeping puddle of regret.
13. Indulge in drunken diner/ fast food at 4 a.m. This is considered depressing behavior once you become a real adult.
14. STOP PROCRASTINATING YOUR TRIP ABROAD. YOUR CHANCES OF TAKING A LONG VACATION ABROAD DIMINISH AS YOU BECOME MORE SET IN YOUR WAYS AND AS YOU GAIN MORE RESPONSIBILITY.
15. Do ‘unacceptable’ things to your hair. Dye it. Dread it. Shave only the left side of your head and give a shit if it grows back in a flattering manner (hint: it won’t). There’s no time but now.
16. Avoid Burning Man. Save it for your weird-Dad mid-life crisis.
17. Sit down, unplug, and read non-fiction. Do this daily. None of your peers are doing it. They’re playing video games and refreshing Facebook and Gmail chatting about nothing in particular. After a month you’ll be smarter than all of them.
18. Walk into Forever 21 and grab every single crappily-made floral dress available. Is every other girl on the street wearing it? Is it literally falling apart at the seams? Is it also actually five dollars? BUY IT IMMEDIATELY. When you get older, your clothing becomes all expensive blazers and tailored khakis and other pieces that won’t break while on your body. That will be a great day — the day when your closet starts to look respectable. Though those outfits are more expensive, they also last longer and look better on you. You will be a classy human ready to take on the future. But as long as you’re still in your 20s? You know — the demographic of Forever 21? Game on, stretchy black dress with pockets that lasts about a week. Game on.
19. Take road trips. Sitting in a car for days on end isn’t something your body was designed to do forever.
20. Don’t invest in things like window curtains or throw rugs or… Windex. You’re a young, social person who doesn’t have time for things like picture-framing and broom-sweeping. No one actually expects you to maintain a bed skirt or a duvet cover in your 20s, they’re the home decor equivalent of puppies/ children.
21. Go to/host theme parties. Once people age out of their 20s, no one’s trying to wear pajamas or Saran Wrap out of the house. The only theme parties that exist after your 20s are ‘Wedding,’ ‘Baby Shower,’ and ‘Funeral.’
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
"I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles.” -Audry Hepburn
"Learn to become still. And to take your attention away from what you don't want, and all the emotional charge around it, and place your attention on what you wish to experience." -Michael Bernard Beckwith
my god. this is exactly how i feel about dancing.
(take the specific dance style references out, and this describes my sentiments exactly).
From Traci's blog:
(take the specific dance style references out, and this describes my sentiments exactly).
From Traci's blog:
Many, many years ago (four? five? six?) I was quite addicted to tango.
I went alone to my first milonga. I didn't know anyone who danced. I had never taken a class.
Soon thereafter, I danced three times a week at least, danced with everyone who asked, danced with confidence.
My skill, relatively high in a street-cred sorta way, never equaled my desire -- and that's how I liked it.
To remain pretty good, to remain forever an amateur.
A perpetually talented beginner.
Because if I was decent by accident, then my potential was always unfulfilled.
So what would have happened had I given it my time, my love, my discipline, my passion?
Much harder, what if I would have given it my failure, my inability, my letdowns?
I don't know if I've ever given my failure to any thing or any one.
I don't let myself be bad at anything, especially anything about which I really care.
The first taste of failure makes me wanna change direction.
When I hit the glass ceiling (of my own talent) in tango, I didn't take classes.
I never even bought a decent pair of dance shoes!
No, I decided that having good balance was enough. Being able to dance a fast milonga was enough.
And, for a while, it was.
Samba, however.
Maybe because it's not a couples dance; maybe because it's a formal dance that doesn't prohibit smiling.
Maybe because I'm finally able to enjoy more than my successes.
I'm taking classes: I'm okay one day and awful the next; I stand in the back of the room.
Tuesday, I fell during a fast song. Tonight, I embarrassed myself with my own enthusiasm.
I theorize about how our eccentricities and faults in dance class are always relative to hurdles in real life.
I want to know that I can move past being the committed (or, in my dreams, prodigious) amateur.
I want to fail at being fantastic.
(And if I get that far, we'll start imagining what might come next.)
Dancers are stripped enough onstage. You don’t have to know more about them than they’ve given you already.
It doesn’t matter how high you lift your leg. The technique is about transparency, simplicity and making an earnest attempt.
I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.
—Mikhail Baryshnikov
thanks, addie.
after an unwieldy examination of friendship tonight, i am half asleep and reading excerpts of Miranda July:
"It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious. It counts doubly because the conscious mind often makes mistakes, falls for the wrong person. But down there in the well, where there is no light and only thousand-year-old water, a man has no reason to make mistakes. God says do it and you do it. Love her and it is so."
"Do you have doubts about life?
Are you unsure if it is worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise."
"It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious. It counts doubly because the conscious mind often makes mistakes, falls for the wrong person. But down there in the well, where there is no light and only thousand-year-old water, a man has no reason to make mistakes. God says do it and you do it. Love her and it is so."
"Do you have doubts about life?
Are you unsure if it is worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise."
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
On "Reclaiming Travel"
My friend Tu posted about a New York Times blog article about travel, and I thought it was such a fantastic, relevant read.
In the past five years, the amount of time I have spent in transit has been, in short, astounding. Even to myself. Not in a way that demands recognition or bragging, but in a way that serves up the questions of "why?" and "how?"
Often I receive curious inquiries about how I travel so often. and my reasons for it. While in many ways it is inexplicable, I can answer that I am a student of this life and this world. Far too often, people assume that travelers are looking to "hit the landmarks" and "check off the bucket list." While I spend a relatively inordinate amount of time traveling, I tend to spend more time in one city or country rather than hurry around trying to "squeeze" as many places in as possible.
Travel, for me, is not just about seeing the sights. I believe that the discovery of ourselves as humans lies in understanding others. I believe that the realm in which possibility is created is only created once we experience what is outside ourselves.
While there are pros and cons to what we identify as "tourism," my focus in travel is about something different. It is about hearing and marveling at different languages, at the way others walk, at other people's choices in leisure, at landscape, at how clouds look when going westward, at how the sunrise looks when going eastward, at the utensils people use to eat, at the vast vocabulary for "snow," at idioms, at proverbs, at the way salt tastes in different seas, at the way the water changes color when the waves break across different horizons, at the usage of different terms of endearment, at the way people regard each other physically, at the forms of public transportation, at the way people sit to dine. Photography, for me, is not just about snapshots- it's a study of the way others' eyes move, it's a wandering of how sunlight moves across land, it's a capture of emotion in an ordinary moment, it's a peek at the way others seek and execute towards their dreams.
This life- this is not just a search for myself, but a search for myself in relation to other people and in the presence of other cultures. Aloneness while traveling is not always loneliness, but a contemplation on what it means to be human, what it means to be inherently vulnerable, yet inherently capable of reaching any combination of possibilities.
It is my hope that whether I am traveling or staying in one place, I will never stop searching.
(photographs below from one of my recent trips to the big apple, and one from galveston)
-----------------------------
The New York times article is below. I have highlighted a few items that I found particularly meaningful in italics.
Reclaiming Travel
By ILAN STAVANS and JOSHUA ELLISON
July 7, 2012, 3:00 PM
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/reclaiming-travel/
What compels us to leave home, to travel to other places? The great travel writer Bruce Chatwin described nomadism as an “inveterate impulse,” deeply rooted in our species. The relentless movement of the modern world bears this out: our relative prosperity has not turned us into a sedentary species. The World Tourism Organization, an agency of the United Nations, reported nearly a billion tourist arrivals in 2011. Some 200 million people are now living outside their country of birth.
Our once-epic journeys have been downsized to cruise ships and guided tours.
This type of massive movement — the rearrangement, temporary or permanent, of multitudes — is as fundamental to modern life as the Internet, global trade or any other sociopolitical developments. Certainly, many of our most intractable collective challenges as a society are directly linked to our mobility: urbanization, environmental depletion, scarcity and, of course, immigration. An immigrant is a traveler without a return ticket.
In the Bible, the human journey begins with an expulsion. God’s chosen people are also those condemned to wander. Not only wander, but wonder: Why are we in exile? Where is home? Can this rupture ever be repaired? “Gilgamesh,” the Icelandic sagas and “The Odyssey” are all about the itinerant life. Yet these characters don’t see travel as we moderns do. They embark on journeys of mythic significance — the literature of travel in the premodern era did not recognize travel for leisure or self-improvement. Today, our approach to travel is defined not by archetypal imagery but, rather, according to our own mostly prosaic trips. Literature, to be sure, still produces grand quests; likewise, there are still many people whose journeys are precarious and momentous on an epic scale.
For the most fortunate among us, our travels are now routine, devoted mainly to entertainment and personal enrichment. We have turned travel into something ordinary, deprived it of allegorical grandeur. We have made it a business: the business of being on the move. Whatever impels us to travel, it is no longer the oracle, the pilgrimage or the gods. It is the compulsion to be elsewhere, anywhere but here.
St. Augustine believed that “because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.” We often think of restlessness as a malady. Thus, we urgently need to reclaim the etymology of restlessness — “stirring constantly, desirous of action” — to signal our curiosity toward what isn’t us, to explore outside the confines of our own environment. Getting lost isn’t a curse. Not knowing where we are, what to eat, how to speak the language can certainly make us anxious and uneasy. But anxiety is part of any person’s quest to find the parameters of life’s possibilities.
The act of traveling is an impossibly broad category: it can encompass both the death march and the cruise ship. Travel has no inherent moral character, no necessary outcome. It can be precious or worthless, productive or destructive. It can be ennobling or self-satisfied. The returns can be only as good as what we offer of ourselves in the process. So what distinguishes meaningful, fruitful travel from mere tourism? What turns travel into a quest rather than self-serving escapism?
George Steiner wrote that “human beings need to learn to be each other’s guests on this small planet.” We usually focus on the ethical imperative of hospitality, on the obligation to be a generous host. When we travel, though, we are asking for hospitality. There’s great vulnerability in this. It also requires considerable strength. To be a good guest — like being a good host — one needs to be secure in one’s own premises: where you stand, who you are. This means we tend to romanticize travel as a lonely pursuit. In fact, a much deeper virtue arises from the demands it makes on us as social beings.
Travel is a search for meaning, not only in our own lives, but also in the lives of others. The humility required for genuine travel is exactly what is missing from its opposite extreme, tourism.
Modern tourism does not promise transformation but rather the possibility of leaving home and coming back without any significant change or challenge. Tourists may enjoy the visit only because it is short. The memory of it, the retelling, will always be better. Whereas travel is about the unexpected, about giving oneself over to disorientation, tourism is safe, controlled and predetermined. We take a vacation, not so much to discover a new landscape, but to find respite from our current one, an antidote to routine.
There are still traces of the pilgrimage, even in tourism, though they have become warped and solipsistic. Holy seekers go looking for oracles, tombs, sites of revelation. Tourists like to visit ruins, empty churches, battlefields, memorials. Tourist kitsch depends on a sterilized version of history and a smug assurance that all of our stories of the past are ultimately redemptive — even if it is only the tourists’ false witness that redeems them. There’s no seeking required, and no real challenge, because the emotional voyage is preprogrammed. The world has become a frighteningly small place.
The planet’s size hasn’t changed, of course, but our outsize egos have shrunk it dramatically. We might feel we know our own neighborhood, our own city, our own country, yet we still know so little about other individuals, what distinguishes them from us, how they make their habitat into home.
This lack of awareness is even more pronounced when it comes to different cultures. The media bombards us with images from far-away places, making distant people seem less foreign, more relatable to us, less threatening. It’s a mirage, obviously. The kind of travel to which we aspire should tolerate uncertainty and discomfort. It isn’t about pain or excessive strain — travel doesn’t need to be an extreme sport — but we need to permit ourselves to be clumsy, inexpert and even a bit lonely. We might never understand travel as our ancestors did: our world is too open, relativistic, secular, demystified. But we will need to reclaim some notion of the heroic: a quest for communion and, ultimately, self-knowledge.
Our wandering is meant to lead back toward ourselves. This is the paradox: we set out on adventures to gain deeper access to ourselves; we travel to transcend our own limitations. Travel should be an art through which our restlessness finds expression. We must bring back the idea of travel as a search.
--
Ilan Stavans is a professor of literature at Amherst College. Joshua Ellison is the editor of the literary journal Habitus.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
"Theme and Variations II"
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Heart, do not bruise the breast
That sheltered you so long;
Beat quietly, strange guest.
Or have I done you wrong
To feed you life so fast?
Why, no; digest this food
And thrive. You could outlast
Discomfort if you would.
You do not know for whom
These tears drip through my hands.
You thud in the bright room
Darkly. This pain demands
No action on your part,
Who never saw that face.
These eyes, that let him in,
(Not you, my guiltless heart)
These eyes, let them erase
His image, blot him out
With weeping, and go blind.
Heart, do not stain my skin
With bruises; go about
Your simple function. Mind,
Sleep now; do not intrude;
And do not spy; be kind.
Sweet blindness, now begin.
That sheltered you so long;
Beat quietly, strange guest.
Or have I done you wrong
To feed you life so fast?
Why, no; digest this food
And thrive. You could outlast
Discomfort if you would.
You do not know for whom
These tears drip through my hands.
You thud in the bright room
Darkly. This pain demands
No action on your part,
Who never saw that face.
These eyes, that let him in,
(Not you, my guiltless heart)
These eyes, let them erase
His image, blot him out
With weeping, and go blind.
Heart, do not stain my skin
With bruises; go about
Your simple function. Mind,
Sleep now; do not intrude;
And do not spy; be kind.
Sweet blindness, now begin.
Monday, July 2, 2012
today, for the first time, i did a handstand in the middle of the room without the wall behind me. i had a girl i had never met spotting me. her name is catherine. we had been told to choose a partner of equal build and equal sweatiness, and we were perfect together. her beautiful self was pouring with sweat, and we were of the few that raised our hands with R asked us who was scared.
she shook like a leaf as she went skyward, but skyward she went.
and as i raised up, i knew again what it felt like to fly. it's amazing that we don't think ourselves capable of flight, for human flight already exists.
---
after the handstand, catherine let me down as gently as she could and my body's instincts allowed my knees instead of my feet to thud to the ground first. my heart dropped, as i am still sustaining a knee injury which has lasted for several months.
last Tuesday, i almost fell face first while dancing. the person i was dancing with apologized profusely. i hugged him and told him, but if we don't take risks in dance, then why should we dance? when people tell me i am an innovative dancer, it's a huge compliment. but i told J last night, the biggest compliment i have ever received about dance had nothing to do with my ability or aesthetic. a girl came up to me some months ago and told me that no matter what, whether i am dancing or not dancing, i look like i am having a great time. and that means more to me than anything.
we push ourselves every day. the limit of our bodies is the limit imposed by our minds. the lighter i believe i am, the lighter i become.
---
i read this article today, and i felt this extraordinary power from the thoughts that it invoked. Gold medalist Nastia Liukin, after her fall and after not making it to the Olympic team, wrote this online:
Thank you to the 18,000 people that gave me a standing ovation tonight. I will remember this moment for the rest of my life.
Not a negative word, not a complaint, but just gratitude. It fills me with this incredible awe of the human spirit. The article is below, and a video I found of her incredible bravery.
By Christine Brennan, USA TODAY
Why we love the Olympic Games is why some can't stand the pressure of getting to them. Yet every four years, they try, over and over again.
Dara Torres makes it look so easy; she has been to the Olympics five times: 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2008, and if she finishes in the two top tonight in Omaha, she will make her sixth team, a record for a U.S. swimmer. She had made three of those Olympic teams before budding 17-year-old superstar Missy Franklin was born.
On Sunday, in the same half-hour that Torres — a 45-year-old, 12-time Olympic medalist — qualified third-fastest in the 50-meter freestyle at the 2012 U.S. swimming trials, 22-year-old 2008 Olympic women's gymnastics all-around gold medalist Nastia Liukin thudded to the mats, face first, when her hands gave way on the uneven bars, which had always been one of her specialties.
That very same evening, 31-year-old swimmer Anthony Ervin returned after a 12-year absence to make the U.S. team in the men's 50 freestyle, while 18-year-old gymnast Rebecca Bross, competing with a gruesome scar snaking along her right kneecap, made three mistakes on the bars, including one devastating fall, to ensure that she would not be going to London.
We think everything's possible at any age these days. Women giving birth in their late 40s or early 50s. A former president, George H.W. Bush, sky-diving to celebrate his 85th birthday. Tom Watson nearly winning the British Open in 2009 at 59. Pitcher Jamie Moyer winning major league baseball games in his late 40s.
And, Torres perhaps on the verge of making another Olympic team 28 years after she made her first.
Before she arrived in Omaha for the trials, she said in a phone interview that she couldn't feel better — or more uncertain — about what she was about to do. Those two contrasting thoughts made perfect sense to her.
"I feel pretty good," she said. "I have no idea how I'm going to do. I have had some good meets and some not-so-good meets. But I'm going to be the best I can possibly be and I know age is my ally."
After qualifying for tonight's final, Torres was appropriately pleased. "It's a totally different approach than I had when I was 17, at my first Olympics. It's much tougher. People said I was middle-aged at 41, but I'm really, really middle-aged now."
Even though she has hardly had it easy, undergoing intricate shoulder and knee surgeries after her three silver-medal-winning performance at the Beijing Games, Torres is everything that the "older" gymnasts could not be. Even though they are less than half Torres' age, they found themselves betrayed by time and their bodies in a sport that often places elite athletes on the discard pile before they graduate from high school.
A 13-minute span Sunday night in San Jose was especially devastating to two of the sport's recent stars. Liukin, attempting a late comeback after enjoying the spoils of victory for several years after Beijing, gamely continued with her routine after her jarring full-body slam when her hands couldn't hold onto the bar. She finished proudly, never shedding a tear. Later, she performed a flawless balance beam routine and then sent off members of the 2012 Olympic team — the team she did not make — with words of support and wisdom.
Gymnastics is part sport, part high-wire act, and Liukin was not the only gymnast who fell Sunday night. After Bross' third miscue, her coach, Valeri Liukin — Nastia's father — told her it was time to stop, and it was then that her hopes to make an Olympic team ended, likely forever. Bross has a bushel-barrel of world championship medals but had never made an Olympic team, hampered by injuries in 2008 and again this time. Because gymnastics favors the tiniest, youngest, most nimble bodies, Bross is almost certain to never have another chance.
It's by the nature of what they do, trying for the pinnacle of their sport every four years, not every year, that Olympians develop a stunning sense of perspective. And so it was with Liukin.
"I was at the peak of my career four years ago," she said, "and if anybody would have ever told me in 2008 that you would have been competing in the 2012 Olympic trials, I probably wouldn't have believed them."
Just being there, it turns out, was a victory in itself.
she shook like a leaf as she went skyward, but skyward she went.
and as i raised up, i knew again what it felt like to fly. it's amazing that we don't think ourselves capable of flight, for human flight already exists.
---
after the handstand, catherine let me down as gently as she could and my body's instincts allowed my knees instead of my feet to thud to the ground first. my heart dropped, as i am still sustaining a knee injury which has lasted for several months.
last Tuesday, i almost fell face first while dancing. the person i was dancing with apologized profusely. i hugged him and told him, but if we don't take risks in dance, then why should we dance? when people tell me i am an innovative dancer, it's a huge compliment. but i told J last night, the biggest compliment i have ever received about dance had nothing to do with my ability or aesthetic. a girl came up to me some months ago and told me that no matter what, whether i am dancing or not dancing, i look like i am having a great time. and that means more to me than anything.
we push ourselves every day. the limit of our bodies is the limit imposed by our minds. the lighter i believe i am, the lighter i become.
---
i read this article today, and i felt this extraordinary power from the thoughts that it invoked. Gold medalist Nastia Liukin, after her fall and after not making it to the Olympic team, wrote this online:
Thank you to the 18,000 people that gave me a standing ovation tonight. I will remember this moment for the rest of my life.
Not a negative word, not a complaint, but just gratitude. It fills me with this incredible awe of the human spirit. The article is below, and a video I found of her incredible bravery.
By Christine Brennan, USA TODAY
Why we love the Olympic Games is why some can't stand the pressure of getting to them. Yet every four years, they try, over and over again.
Dara Torres makes it look so easy; she has been to the Olympics five times: 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2008, and if she finishes in the two top tonight in Omaha, she will make her sixth team, a record for a U.S. swimmer. She had made three of those Olympic teams before budding 17-year-old superstar Missy Franklin was born.
On Sunday, in the same half-hour that Torres — a 45-year-old, 12-time Olympic medalist — qualified third-fastest in the 50-meter freestyle at the 2012 U.S. swimming trials, 22-year-old 2008 Olympic women's gymnastics all-around gold medalist Nastia Liukin thudded to the mats, face first, when her hands gave way on the uneven bars, which had always been one of her specialties.
That very same evening, 31-year-old swimmer Anthony Ervin returned after a 12-year absence to make the U.S. team in the men's 50 freestyle, while 18-year-old gymnast Rebecca Bross, competing with a gruesome scar snaking along her right kneecap, made three mistakes on the bars, including one devastating fall, to ensure that she would not be going to London.
We think everything's possible at any age these days. Women giving birth in their late 40s or early 50s. A former president, George H.W. Bush, sky-diving to celebrate his 85th birthday. Tom Watson nearly winning the British Open in 2009 at 59. Pitcher Jamie Moyer winning major league baseball games in his late 40s.
And, Torres perhaps on the verge of making another Olympic team 28 years after she made her first.
Before she arrived in Omaha for the trials, she said in a phone interview that she couldn't feel better — or more uncertain — about what she was about to do. Those two contrasting thoughts made perfect sense to her.
"I feel pretty good," she said. "I have no idea how I'm going to do. I have had some good meets and some not-so-good meets. But I'm going to be the best I can possibly be and I know age is my ally."
After qualifying for tonight's final, Torres was appropriately pleased. "It's a totally different approach than I had when I was 17, at my first Olympics. It's much tougher. People said I was middle-aged at 41, but I'm really, really middle-aged now."
Even though she has hardly had it easy, undergoing intricate shoulder and knee surgeries after her three silver-medal-winning performance at the Beijing Games, Torres is everything that the "older" gymnasts could not be. Even though they are less than half Torres' age, they found themselves betrayed by time and their bodies in a sport that often places elite athletes on the discard pile before they graduate from high school.
A 13-minute span Sunday night in San Jose was especially devastating to two of the sport's recent stars. Liukin, attempting a late comeback after enjoying the spoils of victory for several years after Beijing, gamely continued with her routine after her jarring full-body slam when her hands couldn't hold onto the bar. She finished proudly, never shedding a tear. Later, she performed a flawless balance beam routine and then sent off members of the 2012 Olympic team — the team she did not make — with words of support and wisdom.
Gymnastics is part sport, part high-wire act, and Liukin was not the only gymnast who fell Sunday night. After Bross' third miscue, her coach, Valeri Liukin — Nastia's father — told her it was time to stop, and it was then that her hopes to make an Olympic team ended, likely forever. Bross has a bushel-barrel of world championship medals but had never made an Olympic team, hampered by injuries in 2008 and again this time. Because gymnastics favors the tiniest, youngest, most nimble bodies, Bross is almost certain to never have another chance.
It's by the nature of what they do, trying for the pinnacle of their sport every four years, not every year, that Olympians develop a stunning sense of perspective. And so it was with Liukin.
"I was at the peak of my career four years ago," she said, "and if anybody would have ever told me in 2008 that you would have been competing in the 2012 Olympic trials, I probably wouldn't have believed them."
Just being there, it turns out, was a victory in itself.
tell me that my silence creates a possibility that is greater than words
--
the things that impacted my life with a magnitude that i expected:
- dancing tango
- my relationship with my mother
- the sound of laughter
- being in water
- being in love
- being heartbroken
- altitude
- tequila
- talking to strangers
- poetry
- constant travel
- creating photographs
- living outside the United States
- other people's writing
the things that impacted my life with unexpected magnitude:
- drinking water
- wearing color
- my career in business, which a friend told me i would "most definitely fail at."
- tofu
- Capitalization and. Punctuation!
- running
- the heat
- the cold
- living in Texas
- shamefully, Starbucks.
- practicing yoga
- discovering blues dance
- avocado
- my relationship with my father
- humor
- new york city
--
the things that impacted my life with a magnitude that i expected:
- dancing tango
- my relationship with my mother
- the sound of laughter
- being in water
- being in love
- being heartbroken
- altitude
- tequila
- talking to strangers
- poetry
- constant travel
- creating photographs
- living outside the United States
- other people's writing
the things that impacted my life with unexpected magnitude:
- drinking water
- wearing color
- my career in business, which a friend told me i would "most definitely fail at."
- tofu
- Capitalization and. Punctuation!
- running
- the heat
- the cold
- living in Texas
- shamefully, Starbucks.
- practicing yoga
- discovering blues dance
- avocado
- my relationship with my father
- humor
- new york city
had the most phenomenal girls' day/night out.
complete with free dessert and free wine at two separate places. dancing with strangers and amazing live music. managers of restaurants who bet that the waitress can't get our numbers. the spicy one, the spunky one, and the one. hurrah.
"Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they're doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out." - XKCD
complete with free dessert and free wine at two separate places. dancing with strangers and amazing live music. managers of restaurants who bet that the waitress can't get our numbers. the spicy one, the spunky one, and the one. hurrah.
"Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they're doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out." - XKCD